As mentioned on previous post, today I’m playing with LiveUSB creation. Coolo, our lovely (and busy ) openSUSE project manager discard his experimental test of making LiveUSB due to various specific problem with the USB.

I released factory snapshots of USB and CD images - the USB shows just too many USB specific problems to be worthy, so I kind of decided to kill this idea again ;( More…

Before taking the tutorial mentioned by Luiz Fernando, I’m trying with KIWI LiveUSB stick tutorial. I’ve followed the tutorial last month but the process unfinished yet due to the complaining from KIWI that the image doesn’t fit on my 2 GB USB Flash Disk. At the moment, I was stopped the process and planned to continue after buying another bigger flash disk. I take this conclusion with the assumption KIWI need more than 2 GB of USB disk.

Today I used same tutorial with another assumption , probably the problem occurred due to the annoying bug with KIWI in earlier version, not with the size of USB disk. KIWI using same image used by LiveCD (about 700 MB), so, 2 GB of USB disk should be fit with the requirement of KIWI for building live USB stick.

With this assumption, I’m trying KIWI once again for building live USB stick with same device (2 GB of USB flash disk), and now the process ended successfully. I could make a running USB Live stick with KIWI Wiki guidance for making USB live stick. Below is the summary of guidance :

1. Install openSUSE with standard option. The easiest way is using openSUSE liveCD installation , but you still needed an installation DVD or DVD iso image as base installation source.
2. Copying the entire content of installation DVD to specified folder as installation source. If you used iso image, you could mount the iso into specified folder with this command : mount -o loop name-of-iso-image specified-folderex : mount -o loop openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD-i386.iso /mnt/iso
3. Add the KIWI installation source.

zypper sa http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools/openSUSE_10.3 kiwi

4. Installing kiwi component :

zypper in kiwi kiwi-desc-livesystem kiwi-desc-usbboot

5. Make proper changes to usbboot config.xml files on /usr/share/kiwi/image/usbboot/suse-10.3/config.xml and replace following lines with your local repos :

<repository type="yast2" status="replaceable">
<source path="/image/CDs/full-10.3-i386"/>
</repository>


6. Make proper changes to livecd config.xml /usr/share/kiwi/image/kwliveCD-suse-10.3/config.xml and replace this portion xml code to your local repos :

<repository type="yast2">
<source path="/mounts/dist/install/SLP/openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD/i386/DVD1/"/>
</repository>
<repository type="rpm-md">
<source path="http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/10.3:/Testing/openSUSE_10.3/"/>
</repository>
<repository type="rpm-md">
<source path="http://download.opensuse.org/update/10.3/"/>
</repository>


7. Newer version of KIWI complaining about the version number on config.xml (it should be version number, major and minor changes), so, change this line : <version>2.5</version> with something like <version>2.5.0</version>
8. Remove file .checksum.md5 on /usr/share/kiwi/image/usbboot/suse-10.3/ (it’s hidden file, so make a deal with your display on file manager preferences, ie : show hidden files on konqueror)
9. Clean up temporary folder for kiwi processing

rm -rf /tmp/kiwi*

10. Run the kiwi command (replace KDE with Gnome if you more preferred with GNOME desktop manager)

kiwi --prepare /usr/share/kiwi/image/kwliveCD-suse-10.3 --root /tmp/kiwi-tmp --add-profile KDE --logfile terminal

11. Kiwi will processing and building the image. It should be ended with the information “KIWI exited successfully done”. If you get an error exception, please make a deal with the error
12. Create the compressed image. The process will produces the image named openSUSE-10.3.i686-2.5.0 on /tmp/kiwi-image/

mkdir /tmp/kiwi-image
kiwi –type usb –create /tmp/kiwi-tmp -d /tmp/kiwi-image –logfile terminal

13. Plugin your USB flash disk and specifies the location of your USB flash on /dev folder (ls /dev/sd* will display your USB flash disk at the end of the list)
14. Umount (ie : umount /dev/sdc1)
15. Create a bootable LiveUSB stick with openSUSE 10.3 by run the command :

kiwi --bootstick /tmp/kiwi-image/initrd-usbboot-suse-10.3.i686-2.1.1.splash.gz --bootstick-system /tmp/kiwi-image/openSUSE-10.3.i686-2.5.0

16. Try your LiveUSB stick by rebooting with USB boot as your first device boot priority.

The above procedure using openSUSE 10.3 as base installation but the overall process *should be* work with openSUSE 11.0 or newer version with a small modification. Please change the process path according your openSUSE version.

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